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Professor Zuhal

I was formerly the Minister for Research and Technology, on leaving government I was asked by the Al Azhar Foundation to establish a new university; initially I was reluctant because there are so many universities in Indonesia. However I was convinced by them as the middle class and up usually go to Christian schools, so there was a need for a good Islamic university to prove to the community that Islamic based foundations can also provide good education. This was a captive market.

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Professor Zuhal

Al Azhar is an enterprising university as we use entrepreneurship as the core of how we operate; when I first started I had nothing so I developed this university through my own enterprising approach. I used my former network and got 22 companies on board to support us as we had no state subsidies; I convinced them that if they helped us through CSR we could provide equitable education to our students.

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Professor Zuhal

We focus on areas of research that other universities do not. We are running an IT centre in Jababeka through our cooperation with Korea and focus on megatronics and robotics.

Our literature concentrates on Mandarin and Arabic; not Arabic as a vehicle for religious communication but to open the opportunity for business, as investment from the Middle East is a great opportunity. We will also be the largest Mandarin and Confucian institute in Indonesia through partnerships with universities in China.

For law, we do not cover common law but we cover corporate law, which is why South Carolina University wanted to cooperate with us. There is a lack of focus in Indonesia on shariah banking and shariah compliance in business within education. With South Carolina we have a corporate law partnerhip, they give lectures from over there at 8 o’clock in the morning which is 8 pm in the evening here. We provide expertise on shariah corporate law and based on that we do joint research, this research has been used by Citibank. Therefore our advantage is focusing on subject that other universities do not.

Indonesia has become a model that shows Islam, democracy, science and technology can go hand in hand. Even though we are an Islamic based university, our partnerships do not have to be Islamic as we are fully open.